Introduction

A few weeks back it felt like Oprah was giving cars away. Only that the cars were books and we actually had to pay for them. So essentially not the same thing at all, but still amazing.

Every year Exclusive Books hosts a warehouse sale in Johannesburg (maybe twice a year?) and sells the books for R50 per kilogram (that's about €5). Holy shit.

The books were just too cool. My cousin and I just loaded in anything we thought could be remotely interesting (in other terms if the cover was colourful), but my sister was more discerning. In the end we walked out with 47kg between the three of us.

It is great to not have to fork out R800 for an art book. Normally, the books I use for research cost too much because they are in quite a specific field that doesn't interest the general public? Online activism, you say? We just push the 'like' button on Facebook and things change. Comic books and graphic novels as literary works? No, man, those are just for children/nerds. I'll wait til someone makes a movie out of it. How the Internet has affected/changed our way of thinking? Not really interested, hand me 50 Shades of Grey please.

Sure, I am generalising (as always), but what made the warehouse sale so fun is stocking up on books you would ordinarily not consider because they would not fit in entirely with the information you need and then not justify the expense incurred. But here, paying between R50 and R150 for a great art book is beyond worth it. I might have grabbed one or two silly books (like the one where you have to identify famous people by their hairstyle). Overall however this was better than Christmas and Easter and birthdays all put together.

I can see a lot of life in you

There's a book series called City-lit, where a city is explored through excerpts from various other books to chart the feeling of a particular space at different times. I just finished reading the book on Berlin, and together with watching 24h Berlin, and my father totalling his car in Berlin, well, the city is coming to me although I am very far removed physically from it.

This waiting around for something, anything, to happen is making me feel like an animal trapped in a cage that it could pimp out and make super comfortable but now cannot leave until a freaking earthquake comes and shatters the bars. Slightly over exaggerated, sure, but waiting for things to happen is not programmed into me. Fuck all the chilling and cleaning and baking and cooking and planning Taaltandem (which takes 3 minutes) because I'd rather be busy.

On the other hand, I know this is the moment to be patient. Pro-active, yes, but patient. Wait to hear from Japan, wait to hear from Goethe, wait to hear from Germany, wait to hear from Sandton, wait to hear. WAIT. WAIT. Ugh. Wait.

Enjoy the chilling, who knows when you can chill again and won't have to get up before 10 AM on a weekday. Enjoy the possibility of nothing. Tell yourself stupid things like this to somehow infuse your life with the tiniest level of importance.

Ja. And in the meantime be thankful for friends like K who keep you in the loop and organise jobs for you and drink wine with you in the cinema because otherwise Lincoln would be unbearably boring and give you Macadamia-nut-butter and help you make a gift for your grandmother and are really great.

So great they make you bake cookies with hearts, from this recipe, which fails a bit but remains tasty.

The Letter

It was a slow start. I actually thought this would be one of those books that I will pretend to have read when other people start talking about anything more complicated than the Little Prince. However, the Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar were fantastic.

I am at a cross-roads in my life, which at the moment consists of waiting and spending too much time on 9gag. By comparison, Hadrian is nearing the end of his and writes a last letter to his successor Marcus Aurelius. Here he describes his childhood in Spain, his grandfather, how he ascended to the seat of emperor (he gets rid of a throne at some point), how he triumphed in battle and how he ruled the empire. Hadrian also speaks of his love of philosophy, music, art and poetry, and of his appreciation for Greek culture.

I am no expert in the Roman emperors, but Hadrian is remarkable because he does not possess some identifiable hamartia, unlike Shakespeare's Mark Antony or Goscinny and Uderzo's Julius Caesar. Instead, he aims for peace and for people of different cultures to be able to life next to one another without the constant threat of death and destruction. He also recognises that "our great mistake is to try and extract from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has" (p.47). It sounds similar to Einstein stating that you cannot judge a fish by how well he can climb a tree (or something like that).

Hadrian acknowledges a basic humanity and under his rule the laws pertaining to slaves and gladiators were changed because the emperor wanted everyone, be they Roman, slave or barbarian, to share an interest in having Rome prosper and endure. In the reflections by Yourcenar at the back of the book she writes that she was much influenced by a paragraph she found in a letter from Flaubert to La Sylphide: "The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that 'black hole' is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions - nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. Just when the Gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur."

This is no easy read, but worth the trouble of getting past the first pages in order to become truly immersed in the story. Sure, it is a bit strange to read a fictional memoir of a Roman emperor from 2 AD and which was written by a French lady in the 1940s. On the back cover the Independent on Sunday is quoted as saying that "Yourcenar conjures worlds. She can make us share passion - for beauty, bodies, ideas, even power - and consider it closely at the same time. She is that most extraordinary thing: a sensual writer."

And to see Yourcenar's words come to life in your imagination is magic.

hahahaha

Wednesday was the final battle. The same lady comes every year from Bloemfontein to see if our French is up to par and give the final stamp of approval. Since my first year I have had some aversion towards her, but luckily I've learnt to smile and nod and wait for her to finish asking a question that is hidden somewhere in her ten minute elaboration on my dissertation. It all went fine. Now I am donedonedonedonedonedone. It is exhilarating and anxiety-inducing at the same time, this not knowing what and where and when and how.

Until the future and I see eye-to-eye, here are my summer reads, courtesy of one last meander through the university's library:

1. Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger (2008) 

2. Carson McCullers : The heart is a lonely hunter (1940)

3. J.P. Singh: Globalized Arts (2011)

4. Frank Rose: The Art of Immersion (2011)
      or a review on The Guardian

5. Ilija Trojanow: Der Weltensammler (2006)

6. Irvine Welsh: Trainspotting (1993)

7. Anna Gavalda: Ich wünsche mir, daß irgendwo jemand auf mich wartet  (1999: Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part)

8. Anton Harber: Diepsloot (2011)

9. John Kinsella: Peripheral Light (2004)

10. Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis ( 2003)

Après moi

via On the shoulders of giants on Pinterest

My meaningful distraction was putting all the books I have read under my bed and all the ones I have used for intellectual-fake-credit on my bookshelf to be read. If I am to be jobless and poor after graduation, at least I can pretend to be a writer who needs to work on what she has read.

You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends

When we were little, our mom read us a book by Helme Heine called Freunde ( 'friends' in German). It is the tiniest, thinnest little book but it has captured the essence of what friendship is supposed to be better than any literary doorstop. It is about three friends: Franz von Hahn ('Franz von Rooster', von Cock somehow sounds too dirty for a children's book), Johnny Mauser ('Maus' is a Mouse in German) and der dicke Waldemar ( 'the fat Waldemar', he is the rotund pig).

Here they are:

In the book, they spend all their time together, but when they decide to sleep over, it turns out that the mouse's hole is too small, the pig's barn is too smelly and the rooster's perch cannot hold their combined weight. But although each one then spends the night in their own bed, they meet in their dreams, "because real friends dream about one another". 

I like the idea of not having to be bound at the hip to be good friends. Some of mine are closer than others (in distance, not in the way I appreciate them), but every one brings something different to a friendship. Friends are like a deck of cards : not every card is suited to every hand you play, but you need the whole deck to play a game. I know my simile is not the most complete since one could argue that some cards are never used and that the Joker is often ignored, but I still feel that every person contributes/contributed to the way each individual sees the world. 

Often, we lose sight of one another, or we go on different paths and only communicate by sending the occasional sms/BBM/WhatsApp message. We might even only spy on each other via social networking sites and stalk old friends through Facebook updates. On the one hand, it has enabled us to stay in touch and to be aware what is going on in other's lives without putting too much effort in it. But it has also made us impersonal: I should not know what is going on in your life without you wanting to tell me, without us actually communicating. Or is this the way friendship is going? Twitter updates and @friend statuses? 

I don't know. I'd rather be Waldemar and have my behind be used to stuff the hole in the boat so that the Freunde can go fishing in the pond together than to spend all my time with my electronics.   

I change shapes just to hide in this place

I don't really like Sci-Fi/Fantasy books. My library had no neatly stacked copies of the Discworld series or Philip K Dick novels. Neither did I finish 1984, or start with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yesterday I said I was reading Lauren Beukes' Zoo City, and it was so engrossing that I had to know, I had to finish it. I know I've missed the bandwagon somewhat, but this is a really cool book. It's set in the Joburg you know, with Hillbrow being rebranded in name only to Zoo City. It is still equally dodgy, with prozzies, drug dealers and gang wars whilst people live in derelict buildings and the police rarely shows up.

However, people who feel guilty about something are 'animalled', meaning that after the guilt sets in, an animal shows up which gives them a magical power and which they cannot stand to be separated from. The main character, Zinzi December, carries around a sloth. A sloth. How cool is that. Like a giant furry backpack. She also has the power to find lost things. If you have seen that Eskom 49 Million ad, where everyone is connected by pieces of string, you can imagine how she sees lost things connected to the person who lost it.

I don't want to write a review, because enough others have done so. Also because I am lazy and just really liked the book. A sloth. Magic. Mystery. Non/Real Jozi. The cover. It is just all very cool.

word for word

via Becky

Acknowledge

Ok, I must confess something now: I have copied a few things from Riette over at Confessions of a Pretoria Chique. On her site I discovered the two buttons that now also cheer up my constantly changing page :

• I pledge to read the printed word, which quite self-evidently supports reading anything that is printed. With all the tablets, e-readers and online newspapers that are taking over, people are forgetting the thrill of burying one's nose in the crisp smell of a brand new book, or appreciating second hand books with special inscriptions and an even more interesting smell of the old and forgotten. At some point last year I scribbled this in my diary after a visit to the dark recesses of the library: "Books, when touched, breathe out a sigh of relief - we have not been forgotten, our words are not for nothing, our knowledge is still here, reachable, touchable, at your fingertips. "

and

• LINKwithlove, which supports the idea that although the internet is such a vast virtual reality with so much information, the source should always be acknowledged. Strange how in business, at university and even at school plagiarism is seen as an evil, but online no-one fears copying someone else's ideas because it does not seem to be so important. I try to name the sources, simply because I would also appreciate being named if someone were to like my ideas or images or so. Here is LINKwithlove's mission statement:

Resurrect

I found this book by James Bradley ( his blog is also noteworthy) on my grandmother's shelf and after a year of only reading "proper" literature ( as in the books that form part of top 100 lists, but are tedious to get through), this was a good read. I like books that transport me far away from my reality, into another time and another country, where the mindset and the circumstances are vastly different from my own.

The Resurrectionist follows the life of Gabriel Swift, who is orphaned at a young age and as a teenager starts working for an anatomist. Through various choices he is fired and "descends into a hell partly of his own making and the violence of the London underworld" ( read the full description and listen to three readings by the author on Faber & Faber) . The story is also loosely based on the Burke and Hare murders, where two Irishmen killed 17 people and sold the bodies to Dr Robert Knox.

What I liked most was Bradley's preoccupation with how our identities are shaped and how the fragility of life is often ignored. We take living for granted, without considering that it all has to end, sooner or later.

"They are such little things, these lives of ours; cheap got, cheap lost, mere flickers against the ever dark, brief shadows on a wall. This life no more substantial than breath, a light which fills the chambers of our bodies, and is gone."

Books on my walls..

There is a box of books under my bed. The two long shelves above my bed are already stacked so high that I am afraid they won't hold and books will tumble on me while I sleep. It wouldn't be the worst way to be woken though. My studies involve buying lots of books, reading sparknotes and pretending that I understand the intricate story lines and subtext, so every year I acquire a couple more. Also, every time we go to the hospice or walk by a second hand book store, I walk out with a stack of books.

I have two favourite books. The one I even bought twice : once in an English book store in Berlin, and then, thinking that I would never get it back after having lent it to a friend, I bought it again at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. The book was looking at me, and my friend Adam said that it was fate: I had lost the book but found it again. I had to buy it. Well, a few weeks later I was back in SA and my book-borrowing friend was moving to the Netherlands, so I got it back. Now I have two copies of Joseph Heller's God Knows, but I don't think I'll ever part with either copy.

A quick word about Shakespeare & Co. : it is at the same time the greatest book store and the most pretentious. It is located on the left bank of the Seine and manages to sell a great number of great books in a tiny space. Upstairs there is a little corner with an old typewriter in between all the children's books, and in the next room there are benches against the wall and old, valuable-looking books. My memory might fail me or they might have changed, because I was last there in 2009. The environment is great, but the employees seem to be hipster-coolkid-American-students who look condescendingly at every purchase you make. It was probably just a long day and I am certainly not cool enough, but I thought the people there were ruining  the atmosphere a bit.

Back to my books. One day, I would like to have an entire room dedicated to them, with one of those rolling ladders and comfortable sofas and it should smell like happiness.

Here are some cool home libraries I found on shelterness:

or this one is quite cool as well: 

from here

Books

*A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. 

I like to think I am a literate girl.

Read why You should date an illiterate girl by Charles Warnke (there are 2 pages, so remember to click 'next' at the bottom).

i ♥ books

I like the way they smell. My Paradise Lost smells like no one has looked at it in centuries. And then that new book smell. The excitement that comes with discovering the knowledge books contain. The other day I was sitting in the library, looking through some design books, and it hit me: here I was, surrounded by knowledge.   We might be discovering new things daily, advances are made, but none would happen without the previous knowledge, and util recently, that knowledge was stored in books.

So now the digital advent has changed the need for books. Why carry around a brick when you can carry around the lightness of a kindle. I understand the argument that it is more practical to have information stored digitally, that it is more environmentally safe perhaps, that the screen still looks like a real book. But one cannot replace that smell. One cannot walk into an on-line library and be astounded by the immensity of what people have written. A digital file does not compare to the actual words on the actual page. I don't even consider blogging to be proper writing. It has to be done, pen on paper.

So I like my books. I like being able to take one down, open any page, read a bit. I like being lost in a world of my imagination.

But here is another guy I like : Brian Dettmer ( I found him here )

He is known as the "book surgeon" because he forms fantastical pieces of art out of old encyclopaedias and other books.
Here are some examples. Marvellous, aren't they.

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